"Provocateur" is Jack Feldman, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has also been employed in the Departments of Management at the University of Florida, Gainesville (1972-1985) and the University of Texas at Arlington (1985-1986.) He is a Fellow of The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and a Charter Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Monday, October 22, 2012

A while ago a friend asked me when I was going to write about Libya. I passed, explaining that I have no expertise in foreign relations, intelligence or security, and therefore doubted that I had anything except personal opinions to offer. We all know what they're worth. So why now? It occurred to me that there are aspects of the whole sad, sickening Benghazi affair that I do know something about, and that nobody else seems to be discussing. Let's start with background:

If you've read the "evolution" essay you know that I take natural science seriously. In that context let's examine the Obama policy toward the Middle East, the "Arab Spring" particularly. I maintain it's one of appeasement and playing to the mob. Obama's words and deeds are designed to give the impression that we support the so-called "democratic" movements despite their dominance by the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist groups. He, and his mouthpiece Clinton, speak and act as if al-Qaeda is no longer a viable threat despite all the evidence to the contrary. This fits Obama's fantasy image as a terror-fighter, as if he'd fast-roped into Bin Laden's compound with a Bowie in his teeth, MP5 blazing.

Our real policy is very different. We hamper our troops in Afghanistan with with unrealistic rules of engagement and overreliance on technology (read here) while using drones to blow people up by remote control. Consider this: Afghans, Persians and Arabs place tremendous importance on honor. Honor includes personal courage, among other things. Drone attacks and restrictive rules of engagement don't signify courage to these people; they imply cowardice. It doesn't matter how much personal courage our troops have if our enemy doesn't see it. It doesn't matter how much courage our people display if our leaders are seen as cowards. What matters is that cowards are weak. When attacked, they run.

Given the above, what does it say to our enemies about American resolve and courage when the Marine guards at our Egyptian embassy have no live ammunition? When the United States contracts the security of our Benghazi consulate to questionable locals and refuses repeated requests for real forces? These actions fit the Obama/Clinton line that Muslims love us, but they communicate weakness to anyone paying attention. Here's the punchline: Throughout the natural world, weakness attracts predation. Everywhere, all the time. Obama's public relations game virtually guaranteed an attack somewhere, sometime---especially on the 9/11 anniversary.

That's Part 1. Part 2 is why security at the Libyan consulate was so poor despite repeated requests from our late ambassador. Start with the organizational culture of every bureaucracy, public or private. How does one survive? By going along and keeping one's head down. How does one advance? By sucking up. At General Motors it was widely known that the surest way to ruin your career was to be right when your boss was wrong, and prove it. Is there any doubt that the State Department is the same? Who's going to dispute the Secretary and stand up for the people under threat?

Given the top-down political imperative to make Obama's policies look successful, and the doubt that serious embassy and consular security might cast on that image, it's no wonder that neither the realities of Libya nor our people's repeated, almost desperate, requests made any difference. Clinton went along with Obama because her personal ambitions--whether as a Supreme Court justice or future presidential candidate--are tied to his success. Now she's taken responsibility for her department's failings, acting the good soldier to protect her boss. But her public-relations efforts can't hide the fact that the conditions precipitating the murders of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were the direct, deliberate creation of Barack Hussein Obama in the service of his reelection. Hilary Rodham Clinton is an accessory both before and after the fact. Both are guilty of depraved indifference to the lives of our overseas personnel, and both have the blood of Stevens, Smith, Woods and Doherty dripping from them.

Quote of the week:

"You ask, what is our policy? I say: To wage war... with all our might and

with all the strength God will give us; to wage war against a monstrous